Rumour has it that many people who work in a lab enjoy cooking. Apart from the organisational parallels that can be drawn between following a protocol and a recipe, did you realise how much the two activities can have in common?
If there is one certainty in life, it is that time has always been there, and will always remain. But although it is a basic fact of our existence, most people don’t tend to reflect much on the characteristics and implications of time. Eva Hoffman did.
A lot of scientists who are “scared” of statistics fall into the trap of ignoring the existence of anything beyond a t-test. But using the right method to analyse your data is essential to having confidence in your results, and there are a lot more methods out there than the t-test.
After having discussed what epigenetic mechanisms are and how we’ve learnt about what they do, it is now time to look into how epigenetics affect our lives if things do not go the way they are supposed to go.
Epigenetics is the most rapidly expanding field in biology. In the second article in this series, I discussed which experimental techniques have been crucial in gaining insight into epigenetic processes. I will now shed light on what those and other methods have taught us.
In the past decade, important advances have been made in the field of epigenetics. Obviously, unraveling epigenetic mechanisms has been greatly facilitated by technological developments. I’ll try to give you an impression of the types of experiments that have helped fuel those new and exciting insights.